July 1 marked the start of a new round of sanctions designed to destroy the economy of Iran, create widespread suffering among the Iranian people, and thereby effect regime change in that country. The ostensible reason for the sanctions is that Iran has a nuclear program, which Washington and its allies allege is leading to the development of nuclear weapons. The Iranian government has denied any such intention, stating that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran is far from the first country to suffer from a cutoff or sharp reduction in trade due to sanctions. Over the past several decades, the U.S. - sometimes through the United Nations Security Council, sometimes in coordination with its imperialist allies, sometimes on its own - has imposed sanctions, embargoes and blockades on dozens of countries. Some of the sanctions regimes have lasted for decades, in the case of Cuba a half-century.

The justifications for imposing sanctions have included alleged human rights violations, lack of democracy, military aggression in violation of international law, and engaging in terrorist acts. But a giant asterisk must be attached here, with a notation reading: "Not applicable to the United States, its imperialist allies, surrogates and puppets."

Liberty has been buried under the weight of modern scientific hubris and corruption

Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it's not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it's because of "global warming."

I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, "Jack doesn't believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that - to put it in scientific terms - it's summer and the sun is hot."

On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that "If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks."

It's summertime, Seth! It gets hot in the summer!

It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There's a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It's about trends and cycles.

It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that "more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States." The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that "The US is less than 10% of the globe" while ignoring that "Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter."

Movie poster detail from the documentary, Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price.

Walmart's explosive growth has gutted two key pillars of the American middle class: small businesses and well-paid manufacturing jobs

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, 50 years ago this month. Sprawled along a major thoroughfare outside the city's downtown, that inaugural store embodied many of the hallmarks that have since come to define the Walmart way of doing business. Walton scoured the country for the cheapest merchandise and deftly exploited a loophole in federal law to pay his mostly female workforce less than minimum wage.

That relentless focus on squeezing workers and suppliers for every advantage has paid off since July 1962. Walmart is now the second-largest corporation on the planet. It took in almost half-a-trillion dollars last year at more than 10,000 stores worldwide.

Walmart now captures one of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries. Its stores are so plentiful that it's easy to imagine that the retailer has long since reached the upper limit of its growth potential. It hasn't. Walmart has opened over 1,100 new supercenters since 2005 and expanded its U.S. sales by 35 percent. It aims to keep on growing that fast. With an eye to infiltrating urban areas, Walmart recently introduced smaller "neighborhood markets" and "express" stores.

Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out.

1. U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans.

Total corporate profits for 2011 were $1.97 trillion. Corporations paid $181 billion in federal taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state taxes (2%), for a total tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20% of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes.

2. The high-profit, tax-avoiding tech industry was built on publicly-funded research.

The technology sector has been more dependent on government research and development than any other industry. The U.S. government provided about half of the funding for basic research in technology and communications well into the 1980s. Even today, federal grants support about 60 percent of research performed at universities.

IBM was founded in 1911, Hewlett-Packard in 1947, Intel in 1968, Microsoft in 1975, Apple and Oracle in 1977, Cisco in 1984. All relied on government and military innovations. The more recently incorporated Google, which started in 1996, grew out of the Defense Department's ARPANET system and the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative.

The combined 2011 federal tax payment for the eight companies was just 10.6%.

What is the second half of 2012 going to bring? Are things going to get even worse than they are right now? Unfortunately, that appears more likely with each passing day. I will admit that I am extremely concerned about the second half of 2012. Historically, a financial crisis is much more likely to begin in the fall than during any other season of the year. Just think about it.

The stock market crash of 1929 happened in the fall. "Black Monday" happened on October 19th, 1987. The financial crisis of 2008 started in the fall. There just seems to be something about the fall that brings out the worst in the financial markets. But of course there is not a stock market crash every year. So are there specific reasons why we should be extremely concerned about what is coming this year? Yes, there are.

The ingredients for a "perfect storm" are slowly coming together, and in the months ahead we could very well see the next wave of the economic collapse strike. Sadly, we have never even come close to recovering from the last recession, and this next crisis might end up being even more painful than the last one.

The following are 17 reasons to be extremely concerned about the second half of 2012....

Before moving to Jersey to take charge of the island's police in 2000, Graham Power had served in the senior ranks of four other forces in a career spanning more than 30 years. A recipient of the Queen's Medal for distinguished service, he had been vetted by UK authorities to "top secret" level and was so well regarded that he had also been appointed an assessor for the body that selects chief officers for UK constabularies.

But after eight successful years on Jersey, Power found himself suddenly suspended in what one local politician supporter believes was a "coup d'etat engineered by a small group of powerful people who denied him natural justice".

The initial suspension, which related to Power's management and supervision of a child abuse inquiry centred around Haut de la Garenne, a children's home on the island, continues to be a hugely controversial topic in Jersey. It's an episode which Jersey's critics see as a prime example of the way the island's elite treats those who dare to challenge their authority.

Nine months before Power's suspension on 12 November 2008, the historic child abuse investigation made headlines around the globe after Power's deputy, Lenny Harper, told the world's media he thought his team had found human remains buried under Haut de la Garenne. He told hordes of journalists that suspicious forensic material discovered during excavation tallied with accounts given by various abuse victims of hearing children dragged from their beds at night who were then never seen again. .

Totalitarian governments, like persistent forms of cancer, have latched onto the long history of man, falling and then reemerging from the deep recesses of our cultural biology to wreak havoc upon one unlucky generation to the next. The assumption by most is that these unfortunate empires are the product of bureaucracies gone awry; overtaken by the chaotic maddening hunger for wealth and power, and usually manipulated by the singular ambitions of a mesmerizing dictator. For those of us in the Liberty Movement who are actually educated on the less acknowledged details of history, oligarchy and globalized centralism is much less random than this, and a far more deliberate and devious process than the general unaware public is willing consider.

Unfortunately, the final truth is very complex, even for us...

One cannot place the blame of despotism entirely on the shoulders of globalists. Sadly, the crimes of elites are only possible with a certain amount of complicity from subsections of the populace. Without our penchant for apathy and fear, there can be no control. That is to say, there is no power over us but that which we give away. We pave the road to our own catastrophes.

In the end, a tyrant's primary job is not to crush the masses and rule out of malevolence, but to obtain the voluntary consent of the citizenry, usually through trickery and deceit. Without the permission of the people, subconscious or otherwise, no tyranny can survive.

The following timeline reviews the progression of U.S.-NATO intervention in Syria and counteracts the Big Lie in the corporate media aimed at preparing open imperialist military aggression against the Syrian people.

Sanctions follow establishing opposition

Washington has funneled money to a right-wing Syrian opposition group since at least 2005. (Washington Post, April 16, 2011)

The U.S. reopened its embassy in Damascus in January 2011 after six years. This was no thaw in relations. The new ambassador, Robert S. Ford, who served until October 2011, is a protégé of John Negroponte, who organized death squads in El Salvador in the 1970s and in Iraq while ambassador there in 2004-05. There terror squads killed tens of thousands. Ford served directly under Negroponte at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Ford "played a central role in laying the groundwork within Syria as well as establishing contacts with opposition groups." Two months after he arrived in Damascus, the armed insurgency began. (Global Research, May 28)

Armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 in Daraa, a small town on the Jordanian border. Mass protest movements usually start in large population centers. Later, Saudi Arabia admitted sending weapons to the opposition via Jordan. (RT, March 13)

The U. S. and its NATO allies used grassroots protests in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere as a cover to build support for right-wing insurgencies whose goal was not to help the Syrian people but to bring Syria into the pro-imperialist camp. Any excesses or mistakes by the Assad government were not the real issue.

The Arab League, European Union and U.S. begin imposing economic sanctions, a form of warfare, against Syria in November 2011 on the pretext of stopping state-sanctioned violence against protesters. Stepped-up sanctions and freezing of Syrian assets caused the value of the Syrian pound to drop by 50 percent against the dollar, with the cost of necessities often tripling.

Exiles who received U.S. funding became part of the Syrian National Council. SNC's Burhan Ghalioun said he would open up Syria to the West, end Syria's strategic relationship with Iran (and with the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance), and realign Syria with the reactionary Arab regimes in the Gulf. (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 2, 2011)

The 2012 London olympics start in 4 weeks time. Exclusive interview with investigative journalist Lee Hazledean who is training undercover as a security guard for the London olympics with private security firm G4S. Lee is a filmmaker and investigative TV journalist. He has also been involved in major stories on the IRA and how British Army infiltrated the organisation and carried out false flag operations. He has managed to get undercover as part of the security team at the 2012 Olympics with G4S. He has found there is a media black out on all major news outlets to do with the Olympics unless the story is broken in a news paper or foreign news agency it's unlikely to see the light of day. Security training and officers are so appalling that the safety and security of the London 2012 Olympics are in jeopardy.

Comment: The London Olympics is becoming a veritable profit bonanza for the Industrial security complex.The reporter does sound genuine in the information he learned during training for the private security firm GS4. One possible reason for the flippant way the evacuation and 'casket lining' information was given to the reporter could be that the terrorist threat has been overplayed by GS4 to maximise their profits on the security contract. The practicalities of evacuating 11 million people were not relayed in such a manner to suggest this would be a realistic necessity. At the very least one would expect personnel receiving training would receive specific details of logistics such as transportation requirements, muster points and roles. At this stage there seems very little real threat of the type of event prophesied by the Rockerfeller foundation in 2010, however, it remains to be seen whether 'terror warnings' and the accompanying arrests of patsies will be orchestrated in order to justify the obscene costs the security contractors are reaping.

At the same time the PTB are well aware that there is no 'terror threat' except the one they themselves organise. All of the fighter jets and SAMs on buildings are designed for their manipulative and mind programming effect on the local population, not to protect them. Of course, this lax (or lack of) security is also useful in the event that MI5 or the Mossad etc. are planning on staging a "Muslim terror attack".